It's a 1 tb G-Drive. Nothing else hooked up to it. The footage is from a Sony EX-1, HD. I know it's going to be slow, but it just seems slower ever since I switched to using an external hard drive vs. the internal.

[Alec Beard]"The footage is from a Sony EX-1,"
EX-1 is just 35Mbps?
Are you rendering/exporting back to EX-1?
That makes slow the rendering whatever system you have.
Export to something different (intraframe) unless you are bounded to export to that codec.
With EX-1 and a FW 800 you can render to the external HD.
AS Jerry points another HD for the render files would be the perfect solution.
rafael

Also make sure the drive is formatted Mac OS extended... But FW 800 drives are slower than an internal or external SATA, especially if they are rendering to the same drive the media is stored on. I think it's about 30% faster to render to a drive that doesn't store the source media.. copies faster too.

So if I wanted to use my external for storage and internal for rendering (or vice versa), that would speed it up? Would you recommend doing that? Would I just go to system settings and make the audio and video rendering happen somewhere else?

Yeah, it might speed things up alright, but it should NOT be the same disk as your startup disk. So you must be using a MacPro to do this right, and it should be another internal drive. Which would be faster than a FireWire drive any day as it's a SATA connection, not FireWire.

Hi Alec,
You have to consider your G5's second disk as an external one (and with a fast SATA connexion). Connect your FW 800, and you will have a very nice rig:
- One disk for the System and Applications.
- One disk for media.
- One disk for render files.
Great.
rafael